Developing students' sustainable agriculture competencies requires the alignment of curriculum content to encompass the full complexity of the dynamics of agriculture. However, empirical evidence from sustainable agriculture research indicates that actions oriented towards fostering students' competencies are scarce. To advance understanding, this study monitored and evaluated the development of students' sustainability competencies for smallholder farming during the implementation of a Participatory Integrated Planning (PIP) module—A sustainability learning programme that elaborates on cross-cutting issues of long-term integrated planning, which is normally not taught. A total number of 104 students from two vocational agricultural schools (N<inf>1</inf> = 63; N<inf>2</inf> = 41) were involved in the PIP learning module that was implemented from April 2022 to June 2023. Survey data on the development of the students' competencies were collected at the beginning (April 2022), in-between (December 2022) and end (June 2023) of the implementation of the PIP module. A one-way repeated measures MANOVA test was used to evaluate the effect of the PIP module on the development of students' competencies. Findings revealed that the PIP module significantly contributed to fostering all intended competencies, including facilitator of change, leadership, innovation and creativity, planning, system thinking, stewardship, auto-determination and interdisciplinarity. Improvement of these competencies was much higher in the earlier stage of the learning process compared to the later stage, implying that sustainability learning requires going beyond ‘business-as-usual’ to retain the interest of students and competencies development. Findings also revealed that competencies development levels differ depending on schools' context, implying that sustainability learning programmes should be flexible and adaptive for learning to occur in a real-context environment. These findings have practical implications for policies related to designing and upscaling sustainability learning programmes in vocational agriculture schools. © 2025 The Author(s). International Journal of Training and Development published by Brian Towers (BRITOW) and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
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